“Fundamental accuracy of statement is the one morality of writing. Naming things, calling things what they really are, that is all that writers can do in an age where language has become debased and sterile.” So said novelist Joseph O’Connor, when judging the recent Fish Short Story Prize for 1996. Fundamental accuracy of statement, indeed! Morality, indeed! Naming things, indeed! According to this criterion, James Joyce wasted the last seventeen years of his life, if not the previous seven. Samuel Beckett may as well never have put pen to paper. One thinks of those lines of Rilke, from the Ninth Duino Elegy:
...Are we, perhaps, here just for saying: House.
Bridge, Fountain, Gate, Jug, Fruit tree, Window, -
possibly: Pillar, Tower?...but for saying, remember,
oh, for such saying as never the things themselves
hoped so intensely to be.
Before calling things what they really are, one has to be sure one knows what they really are. Before naming things, one has to be sure one knows the names. The two books under review here, like so many recently published Irish novels, are sure of their names and their things, and are furthermore unaware that any division exists between a name and its thing, a thing and its name. Unfortunately, the kind of fiction I prefer usually employs a radical scepticism about the possibility of ever being able to name things, of being able to call things what they really are, because it doesn’t know which, if any, name to choose, and it doesn’t know what things really are. Perhaps this is too theoretically stringent a stricture to use when reviewing a hard-nosed crime thriller and a racy pacy comedy, but what gives cause for concern is that both writers have produced much better work in the past.
Headbanger
By Hugo Hamilton
(Secker & Warburg, £12.99)
What has happened Hugo Hamilton at all, at all? The author of three stylish and individualistic previous novels set in Germany, Surrogate City, The Last Shot and The Love Test, and a collection of short stories, Dublin Where The Palm Trees Grow, has here gone in for a decidedly drastic and devastating change of direction, and produced a crime thriller set in Dublin. His earlier work marked him out as one of Ireland’s most promising literary hopefuls, but this new book is a tersely written tale aimed at the mass market.
Maverick Garda Pat Coyne is on a Messianic mission to nail top Dublin criminal ‘Drummer’ Cunningham and his gang, while at the same time trying to protect his wife Carmel and their three children from Cunningham’s vengeful attentions. He’d also like to rescue the gangster’s moll, Naomi. He’s the ‘Headbanger’ of the title, ‘Mr Suicide’, ‘the Dublin Dirty Harry’. Along the way we learn of his neuroses and obsessions.
On the plus side, there is much to sympathise with here, for example Coyne’s hatred of golf: ‘Golf is for emotionally disturbed whackoes’, ‘it was for failed psychopaths’; his hatred of art, which his wife Carmel has just taken up: ‘Won’t last. There’s too many at it. All that self-expression lark. There’s too much expression and too little understanding’; his hatred of DIY: ‘And the amount of DIY dickheads hanging around on Saturday morning was unbelievable. People all over the place couldn’t stop the urge to improve things. Can’t you just leave the world alone, you pack of demented dipsticks? Nothing better to do than to start taking apart your sad little semis. Guys deciding to build shelves every Saturday morning of the year until they had drilled an almighty hole in one of their plasterboard walls.’ All of this Neanderthalism on Coyne’s part is coupled with a near aesthetic ‘interest in the precision of language’, which has him fighting back the urge to go into a certain Dublin pub and tell them that it’s not ‘Embibing Emporium’ as the sign outside their door reads, but ‘Imbibing’. Even though Hamilton is doing a bit of literary slumming, you still can’t hide a good writer, and Coyne has some nicely sardonic turns of phrase, as for example when he describes Naomi as ‘a social worker’s dream’.
On the minus side, there are some truly awful puns and word plays, like ‘Shag all’ for ‘Chagall’, ‘pick your own asso’ for ‘Picasso’, and ‘Vermicelli’ for ‘Vermeer’. There are cliched scenes not worthy of Hamilton, like the appearance of that best forgotten breed, the sadistic Christian Brother, and an ‘exciting’ car chase. This is Hamilton condescending to the lowest common denominator.
Perhaps Coyne’s anti-art stance is an ironic tongue-in-cheek comment by Hamilton on how he knows his new work will be received by the more literary of literary critics. Or perhaps he will be like Celine, who kept setting out to write best-selling blockbusters, which the critics kept hailing as great art. But I doubt it. Headbanger is an average to good thriller, but it represents Hamilton indulging in the opportunism of latching on to a hot topic, this time Dublin’s rising crime rate. It is an interesting exercise because it is by someone who was heretofore a ‘serious’ writer, but it is still a sell out by that writer. At least he seems to be having fun selling out. It remains to be seen if he will continue in this vein, or if he will revert to his earlier, more imaginative and satisfying mode.
One doesn’t have to notice that a well-known film producer is thanked at the beginning of the book for his generous support and encouragement during its writing, to foresee a film and a TV series of this dialogue driven story. But if there are straight-to-video movies, why aren’t there straight-to-screenplay novels?
Curtains
By Katy Hayes
(Phoenix House, £12.99)
The change in Katy Hayes’ work is not quite so discernible, and indeed Curtains may seem like a natural progression from 1995’s wonderfully witty and subversive collection of short stories, Forecourt, but it doesn’t quite have the bite or insight of its predecessor, and seems curiously toned down by comparison. The problems of making the transition from short story to full length novel may account for some of the flatness here, but not entirely.
The setting is the claustrophobic and incestuous world of Dublin theatre, a milieu that Hayes, as playwright and director, knows only too well, and which also provided the source for a couple of the stories in Forecourt. Arlene - ‘actually it’s Ar-lay-nah’ - Morrissey is a successful producer putting together a production of Over The Moon, a first play by young novelist, Isobel Coole. Isobel is outwardly a deranged wreck, throwing tantrums and attempting suicide, but it is implied that inwardly she has untold reserves of strength. Arlene is outwardly Ms Together, with a diary full of contact numbers and a plethora of telephones, but it is implied that inwardly she is crumbling. Isobel leaves her boyfriend and moves in with Arlene for the duration of the preparation and run of the show. A wide range of characters tumble across the pages, including the actors (one of whom is Arlene’s ex-husband), the director, the cops, plus The Weirdo, who keeps leaving sinisterly personal messages on Arlene’s answering machine. Perhaps the funniest aspect of the book is Arlene’s recurring conversations with Paddy Kavanagh’s statue along the canal. But this imaginative leap is the exception rather than the rule, in what is an otherwise transparently realist text. There is the occasional nice phrase, like ‘He must have been sent by her fairy godmother or her guardian angel, depending on whether you had a Judaeo-Christian or a Hans Christian-Anderson view of the world’, but otherwise the style verges on journalese, and is, once again, dialogue driven. There is a half-hearted attempt to introduce the abortion issue, but this remains unexplored. The ending is also rather weak and inconclusive. All in all, it reads like a somewhat more sophisticated, but tellingly less bitchy, Julie Burchill. One only hopes that Ms. Hayes will not resort to the reactions of her character Isobel Coole in the book, who goes around to the house of a reviewer, the appropriately named Tommy Hatchett, who gave her play an unfavourable notice, and interrupts a dinner party he is hosting in order to give him a piece of her mind.
Again, one feels the cinema or TV screen would be better media for this narrative, such is, like Headbanger, its fundamental accuracy of statement, and its naming of things. Or even, given its author’s experience and its subject matter, the theatre.
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